Hosted file storage

The recently funded Box.net started out as a hosted file storage service and quickly moved in to the file-sharing space. With some recent upgrades that enabled users to interact with their items in new and direct ways, such as photo-editing or creating a Zazzle t-shirt, box.net became one of the few file-sharing services to participate with the majority of ongoing trends for the social networking and integrated space. The company’s most recent update is called “Collaboration” Beta, which sort of combines the file-sharing and interactive portions of box.net’s services. What the Collaboration Beta does is lets users share folders with colleagues, friends, family, etc. ***

Amazon's hosted storage services suffered technical glitches last week, mishaps that caused some early users to think twice about using the company's nascent Web services. Last Thursday, customers of Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) started a discussion thread about problems in the service. Users of the service, which lets Web site owners contract with Amazon to store data, complained of slow service and error messages. By Sunday, a representative from the Amazon Web Services business unit offered an explanation for the service degradation, which had been resolved. ***

A few days ago I got a demo of Joyent from the company"s CTO, Jason Hoffman. His Web service is an e-mail application, calendar, contact list, and file storage for small groups. It"s similar enough to Outlook and to existing online e-mail applications that it"s easy to grok, but it also has tweaks on the standard model that could make a difference for business customers. It starts with Joyent"s security defaults. The default privacy setting for everybody"s e-mailbox is "wide open." Anybody in the team can peek into anybody else"s mailbox. It"s what Hoffman calls "cubicle security": you trust your coworkers not to snoop on your desk, but if they need to do so they can, and they could save your bacon and the company"s if you"re on vacation and somebody needs that one piece of data that"s on your desk. ***